[Dovecot] bleah

Tom Allison
Thu, 10 Jun 2004 10:24:00 -0000

Not to be a bitch, but I've asked several times about some basic
questions or examples to clarify the essentials for configuration.

What do some of the parameters mean?  Expecially the ones that are
mentioned only one in a paragraph and no where else in the documentation
or wiki.  (ie: login_process_per_use)

And there have been a few others as well. that I won't bother to repeat.

But I've been sitting on this list for a while yet and have found that
when it comes to configuration, none of the emails posted have been
answered or addressed.  The closest I got was a suggestion to use views
instead of tables in postgres.  But technically nothing was ever said
about dovecot itself.

So I have to ask.  Is the sketchy documentation in the source file, the
web page, wiki, and limited reponse on the mailing list a matter of "I
haven't gotten around to it yet" or a deliberate move to promote the
commercial support potential for Procontrol?

I've run into this kind of environment twice before (cyrus and razor)
and in the case of cyrus they just didn't believe in doing the
documentation but suggested I write it myself.  That may be the case
there as well ("I haven't gotten around to it yet".  That's OK
but cyrus
has the difficulty of no one still not providing any answers to how
anything was done, configured, functioned, or why.  So documentation was
kind of a reverse-engineering project in itself.

In the case of razor it's a mix of no time and they would rather support
the company than the project.

I went back and re-read the emails that I had posted earlier and am
pretty sure that they weren't too stupid (ie: how do I test an imap
connection), difficult, or obscure (well, maybe one).

I'm just trying to find more information on how to correctly configure
this server such that I can retain the concept of keeping security in mind.

I'm trolling through the archives and there doesn't seem to be much
discussion from anyone else.  So maybe I'm really stupid and can't do
authentication schemes.

I'm sure by this point I've really pissed a few people off and for that
I mostly apologize.  I'm a little bent here myself.  It just that I
didn't plan on having to set up sniffit to track my IMAP traffic in
order to verify that things were actually working securely.

I'm going to plug along and do it myself and probably get something to
work.  I have plain_text authentication working now, but was really
hoping to actually get something secure.  At this point I really don't
expect an answer, but do hope that after 1.0 is released there will be
time available to get some documentation in order.

IMHO the level of documentation that is available on a software project
is critical to it's use.